Gameplay mechanics were also a lot better with more replayability.

Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can’t count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with handicap features, and also to find Easter eggs. Speaking of Easter eggs, you’d lose a number of hours exploring every nook and cranny finding them!

MeanEYE,
@MeanEYE@lemmy.world avatar

Well yea:

  • No online play meant game had to be played with people sitting next to you. You had to socialize;
  • No updates meant games had to be finished when sold, none of the early access or battle pass bullshit;
  • Games were made hard to artificially give longer play time but this resulted in sense of achievement when you beat the game;
  • Booklets were actually awesome because you had lore in your hands which was written in a way not to spoil the game but hyped you to play further so you could get to that content.

Sure for the most part it’s nostalgia, but technology brought as many, if not more, bad things as it did with good things. We’ve seen games get much better than old games and we’ve seen them much worse.

Swedneck,
@Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

just buy indie games lol

EdibleFriend,
@EdibleFriend@lemmy.world avatar

Those have manuals you can read on the ride home?

Buddahriffic,

These days I’m driving on the way home.

RagingRobot,

Actually there is a company called limited run games I think that goes all out and prints physical copies of some indie games with instructions and bonus stuff. It’s pretty awesome but takes a while to get it.

EdibleFriend,
@EdibleFriend@lemmy.world avatar

Ok that is pretty awesome

SuddenDownpour,

Fun anecdote. The PAL version of Digimon World 1 had a serious bug that prevented your progress to recruit Ogremon, which you needed to recruit Shellmon, which you needed to recruit a bunch of late game digimons, and made your access to several areas extremely harder. A 100% completion was impossible. It was still such a neat game tho.

DarkMetatron,

Comparing modern game with games from the olden days is a little bit like comparing a savery steam pump with a modern internal combustion engine. Sure the general principles are identical but the complexity of the system is a manifold of the other.

I really love retro games, i have very fond memories of the C64 and SNES, but i am not a fan of the glorification of those games. Only a small part of the old games are still fun today and lots of them have bugs. Secret of Mana on the SNES for example has a fun bug where leveling all weapons and spells to max can create a overflow error in the final fight of the game, which removes the mana hero completely from the game, rendering the last fight impossible because only the mana hero can damage the mana dragon significantly.

EatATaco,

This is just nostalgia.

Case in point, you can still play all of these old games. If you are willing to pirate, you can get access to thousands of games, most you never even played before, for free. You never have to pay for another game as long as you live and a still be playing new games from this era of “better” games.

I’ve done this myself. Played for like a month, and then for bored. And basically noone does that. I have the Nintendo switch access to old nes games. My kids never touch it. No one can really say because there is no novelty.

You know why? Modern games are way better. This isn’t to say these isn’t some annoying shit that goes along with them. But the old days weren’t some magical time of gaming. It seems magical because it was new, especially to the people living during that time, and simply due to nostalgia.

I know I won’t be popular, but I love modern gaming. I throw a game I’m interested in in my steam wish list. I wait for it to drop to below 20 dollars, and then I buy it.

The most recent games that I’ve put a ton of hours into are bg3 and anno 1800. No micro transactions, unless I missed something.

I also played a ton of supercell games: coc, cr, and bs. Many entertaining hours over years. Never spent a dime. Micro transactions other people paid allowed me to play for free. How is this not amazing?

I’m open to hearing competing ideas, but if you do you disagree with me, expect me to ask why you don’t do the things above, and just answer the question in your post. If that’s ignored, it will just indicate to me that you realize I’m right.

menemen,
@menemen@lemmy.world avatar

No need to pirate. There is a shitload of games on the internetarchive: archive.org/details/internetarcade

AnUnusualRelic,
@AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world avatar

What was great is that we had more free time.

Drewelite,

I also think there’s a genuine drop in satisfaction when people are presented with more options. I limit myself and only buy new-ish games when I feel like I’ve extracted as much enjoyment out of the last one I bought as I can. I think this helps a lot.

Because what I see a lot of people doing is jumping to the game-of-the-week and then getting numb and saying “there’s no good games” even as they continue to buy new ones every week.

TORFdot0,

Good games are good games no matter the era. I don’t think you can find many serious people claim that Barbie’s Horse Adventures is better than Red Dead Redemption 2 just because it’s retro. And No serious person is going to claim that Suicide Squad is better than A Link to the Past, just because it’s a modern game

menemen,
@menemen@lemmy.world avatar

Depends a lot on the games for me. I can spend a lot of time on old games, if they were mechanically well made. But if the controls are clunky (like e.g. in old adventure games) I am out.

Blackmist,

I think the early 3D era is the worst for this. We really had no idea how movement or cameras should work, and there was a lot of flailing trying to get it right, and people didn’t even realise when it was right.

I was there 3000 years ago when Alien Resurrection came out and you used the left stick to walk and sidestep, and the right stick to pan and tilt, and it felt like utter unplayable madness.

menemen,
@menemen@lemmy.world avatar

I think everyone agrees that we leave early 3d games out of our nostalgia.

Soggy,

That’s one of the reasons Mario 64 still holds up. Despite being so early in 3D platforming it did a really good job with the controls and camera choices. It’s a real mixed bag to go back to that era of gaming, Generation V, but I kinda like that. There wasn’t preconceived notions of what 3D games should be so they tried everything.

EatATaco,

Agreed. Although that’s not what anyone actually says. Just read the comments in this thread. You would think they rdr2 was completely unplayable shit hole of micro transactions.

But what about rdr2 to link to the past? Removing the “considering the era” part of the equation, just 1 to 1.

TORFdot0,

I think it’s really hard to quantify. They are both masterpieces even if you just consider the state they are today and not just the era they are made in.

Sure Red Dead Redemption 2 has “better graphics” but Link to the Past looks great in its 16 bit art style. I wouldn’t want to change the graphics. I don’t think A Link Between Worlds or the switch remake of Link’s Awakening improved the graphics for instance.

Red Dead Redemption 2 might have “deeper” gameplay mechanics but I don’t actually care for them very much. The cores system I think distract from the game, and Arthur is honestly a bit slow and clunky to control during fights; unlike A Link to the Past where fighting with the sword is smooth, blocking with the shield is easy to understand and the items add a element of strategy to the combat.

Ultimately I think that red dead redemption 2 is the better game and part of it is because the modern era it is in allowed the developers to tell an story and create a character that I was invested in more than any other in gaming. But ultimately I think it comes down to personal taste. Earthbound is another game that made me feel similar to RDR2 as far as story beats go. And if I had to pick one game to play for the rest of eternity, I’d be fine with either choice.

EatATaco,

Nice thoughtful reply where I think you mostly catch my feelings as well.

Ultraviolet,

Competitive NES Tetris exemplifies this. The game was already retro when most current top players were fetuses, which completely eliminates nostalgia as a possible factor.

chatokun,

I mean, I do still play these games. I also play new games, so I don’t agree with the comic. Still, Chrono Trigger, FFT WoL, Secret of Mana, Parasite Eve, Xenogears, and some others are still on my PS Vita and I’ve been replaying them. I need to find Megaman X as well, as I loved that game.

Gabu,

It’s available on Steam, as well as the Zero series of games.

chatokun,

… I’m an idiot. I bought it on switch already. Time for a replay!

undergroundoverground,

We all have to be very specific about how you’re defining “better” here. To me, it’s people being very bad at explaining what they mean by it when they say that, making it easy to dismiss as nostalgia. I think you’re mostly right though.

People have become used to better graphics and smoother gameplay. You can’t go back after that. People like having other people to play with too. So, I think those are unfair criticisms. They mean, old style made with the new tech. However, there a whole host of things that have gotten better with modern games. I think we can agree on the last part at least.

Having lived through both, old games were not “better” per se but there is something modern games have lost, in amongst all of the improvements. Games “back in the day” weren’t made with algorithms designed to mess with your psychology to keep you playing, even if you hate the game. They didn’t design the games into evergrinds that only a few sweaty types and professionals can genuinely enjoy either. Old games had a logical, satisfying end where you would put them down afterwards.

Despite all the crap you get with old games, you can tell that so many of them were made to be as much fun as possible. Like, that was the main aim and not “engagement at all costs, even enjoyment.” They were labours of love, warts and all.

That’s why they’ll never remake morrowind as it was but with better graphics, mechanics etc. because it’ll be so apparent imo. I mean, you start off fighting rats in a basement with a toothpick and eventually end up being able to make game breaking gear, just for the hell of it. You had to earn it but it was just really fun. Powerstone 2 was just pure, silly fun.

Fun doesn’t generate as much permanent engagement as whatever the hell they’re using now. I’m not saying modern games aren’t fun, just to be clear. But they’re not made, from the ground up, to be as much fun as possible anymore imo. That’s what I think they’ve lost. But I agree, that doesn’t make old games better, despite their being so old.

thoro,

Games “back in the day” weren’t made with algorithms designed to mess with your psychology to keep you playing, even if you hate the game. They didn’t design the games into evergrinds that only a few sweaty types and professionals can genuinely enjoy either. Old games had a logical, satisfying end where you would put them down afterwards.

Well, many old games were. Arcade games specifically were often designed to get coins from players, with extreme difficulty encouraging grinds and sweaty playthroughs to achieve mastery.

If anything, multiplayer and GaaS brought us back there.

Many new games, especially single player games, are still designed with “fun” in mind, or with even loftier goals and themes, many without exploitative gameplay loops, yet still with distinct, pleasing graphics, art styles, and polished gameplay.

undergroundoverground,

I don’t think anyone was talking about arcade games but I agree that they weren’t excluded either. Even then, you had versions you could own that were very different.

The major labels have lost that and those that are built the way you describe are so few and far in between, they’re barely worth mentioning.

Games in general used to all be like that. Now, the vast majority have to gouge as much as possible. Again, I don’t agree they were better back then but its not improved in every single way either, when looking at them collectively.

CosmicCleric,
@CosmicCleric@lemmy.world avatar

A lot of times people use the word 'better 'when instead they should be using the word ‘prefer’.

ricdeh,
@ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

I am in full agreement with this statement, and would like to add that I think that older games often have a much greater artistic value. They were concerned with crafting an intricate plot, super immersive environments, powerful and transformative music, memorable characters, etc. One game where in my opinion you really feel the volume of love and artistic expression as well as perfectionism put in is the first Risen, and it’s fairly obscure, but I find it to be so captivating that I’d easily play it with greater enthusiasm than any new Ubisoft copy-and-paste title or Valorant / Overwatch / CS:GO. Still, I think that this art / passion approach of quantifying a game’s “goodness” produces just as many contemporary candidates for great games, like The Witcher 3, Baldur’s Gate 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2. The things I like about old RPGs / adventure games are probably not specific to the past, but instead heavily developer dependent. Developers that love their work and are given enough time and money will produce great works of art in the same way that they have 20 years ago.

EatATaco,

People have become used to better graphics and smoother gameplay. You can’t go back after that. People like having other people to play with too.

This is what it ultimately comes down to for me: the games are better, and they can’t go back. If the games from back then were actually better, then people would be playing them all the time. But the reality is that people seem to pull more enjoyment from modern games, which is why they keep going back to them despite the constant “they suck!” complaints.

Despite all the crap you get with old games, you can tell that so many of them were made to be as much fun as possible. Like, that was the main aim and not “engagement at all costs, even enjoyment.” They were labours of love, warts and all.

And I feel that’s true now, like with the games I mentioned (BG3 and Anno 1800). And back then there were definitely cash grabs, like ET jumps to mind as the most famous example, but almost every NES game that was based on some kind of movie or other pop culture thing. It’s just they are better at grabbing cash now. But there are also plenty of modern games that don’t implement these addictive features, in order to keep siphoning money off of you, they are just fun and people play them infinitely more than going back to the olden days.

And, again, I don’t want people to get me wrong. I definitely agree that there is a lot of shit, especially dirty shit, where they abuse human psychology to keep people playing and siphoning off money. But I feel like it’s ridiculously overstated and people are also ridiculously blind to how much better gaming is now than it was “back in the good old days.”

wolfshadowheart,

I somewhat disagree about being “unable to go back”, but I will say it’s sheerly the style of game itself.

Take a game like A Link to the Past. Now look at a game like Retro City Rampage. Despite some 30+ years difference, they are visually nearly identical. Or any of the 2D Sonic games, them being 30 years apart is effectively meaningless.

But yeah, trying to play old Tomb Raider? If you’re expecting even PS3 graphics, boy are you in for a surprise.

However I think there is also an annoying amount of push for “better graphics or bust”. That was the main debate for the console wars, the Wii sucked because its graphics weren’t good and it’s a baby console, Gears of War and Lost Planet for the XBox are the pinnacle of gaming!1! What! No the God of Wa- sorry I got caught in a flashback.

But there are plenty of games you can emulate that can be upscaled and remove the archaic visuals, then it’s just the game design and control scheme. Red Dead Revolver looks and plays great, there’s no reason for anyone to stop playing outside of it just being a little less “AAA”. Similarly, pretty much any of the PS2 exploration games - Jak and Daxter, Spyro, Sly, Ty, Crash - hold up wonderfully today. They’re a bit slower, but they are the foundation that modern games of that genre use.

I don’t think them being slower, clunkier, less “AAA” makes them bad games. I think it makes them older games, and that is not inherently bad. In fact, I would argue that it’s gamers being bad at them, and that games today in many ways are easier to keep people engaged. The D&D arcade game is great, difficult, and would be absolutely dunked on by gamers today for all of its awkward gameplay.

This reminds me of an article I read about “Blade Runner, and old movies in general, are harder to watch because contemporary audiences have gotten used to movies that are faster, which makes them better.” The whole article was effectively trying to state that because new movies have shaped audiences, old movies are becoming unwatchable. In some respects, I’m sure there’s merit to that. In many other respects, I completely disagree. Just because something is in a different language does not remove its value. I see that as a reflection of the viewer, not a reflection of the art.

With that in mind, old video games are a different language. We have to play them with the mindset that things will not be familiar. That does not make them bad, it makes them something to learn, and it’s going to force you to learn things that are uncomfortable because it’s unfamiliar to what you would rather be doing. Old movies are a different language.

Just because you may not understand it does not mean it is worse. Likewise, just because you are familiar with modern games doesn’t make them better either. And finally, better is subjective for the most part anyway. (None of this is directed at you btw, lol not at all trying to say that you don’t understand things!)

Gabu,

Skill issue on your part, you got duped by pretty lights. Super Mario is to this day playable. Megaman X is still one of the thightest platformer games ever made, the controls nearly feel like they read your mind.

Also notice how the few games that are better than these classics were either made by the same people (Igarashi’s “Bloodstained” reboot of Castlevania) or were HEAVILY inspired by them (Hollow Knight, Shovel Knight, 30XX etc)

EatATaco,

How on earth could you conclude from my post anything about my gaming skill?

Duamerthrax,

I regularly play 90’s and 00’s FPS games. All the new release ones I play follow old design philosophies with the hindsight of knowing what doesn’t work. There’s not much in the way of modern, triple-A FPS titles without some form of microtransactions or whatever the hell “seasonal content” is. I wont touch anything that’s a “live service” game. Hell, Epic shutdown the Unreal Tournament servers and even delisted the single player stuff.

EatATaco,

Just curious which games you are playing and if they are on servers. That being said, I’ve had a ton of fun playing battlebit.

Duamerthrax,

Kinda just game up on multiplayer. Right now, I’m replaying Postal Brain Damaged. The last episode is so good. Probably do Turbo Overkill or try and get American McGee’s Alice running.

My old lan party friends are playing some BF game or another. I tried military shooters, but they’re all so flat. I think they were more interested roleplay then combat.

Aradina,

I collect games, mostly PS2 and PS3, and you’re largely correct. Games from back then had just as many issues, we were just more willing to look over them.

RecluseRamble,

It is just nostalgia. Like it or not, that’s the first gamers’ generations saying “everything was better in the good ol’ days”. It was not, we just choose to remember the good stuff.

szczuroarturo,

Its the same with film and anime ,probably also aplies to comics and books Everyone remembers a few good titles from the ‘old times’ ( and the old times depend on the person complaining ) and comapres it to every modern production convieniently forgeting about the garbage and medicore stuff that was put at that time.

And then there is the case of some genres falling put of favor. Whetewer we are talking about western in film or RTS in computer games . That actually is pretty reasonable complain since the way it usualy goes we have a massive oversupply of certain genres followed by a drought because as it turns out there is a limit to how much harem school anime horny teenagers and middle aged corporate workers will watch per year.

MadMike77,
@MadMike77@chaos.social avatar

@EatATaco @TankovayaDiviziya I somewhat agree.

But there is also how games have aged over time. Some game mechanics still work and are fun.

I just recently bought "Populous" on steam for 2$. After learning how to use DosBox the game is still as addictive as it was on my Atari-STE ... but now I have bad old PC sound.

Compare this with "Command & Conquer Tiberium Wars" I should have skipped buying that. The conversion is so faithful that it still has the same stupid unit movements.

EatATaco,

I just recently bought “Populous” on steam for 2$.

It’s funny because I was explicitly thinking of populous at some point when thinking about replayability. What a great game. Although I played it on SNES. Countless hours on that game. Almost as bad as Tetris.

dmalteseknight,
@dmalteseknight@programming.dev avatar

If you are talking about the late 90’s and early 2000’s there was plently of multiplayer games and saving was pretty much standard.

whoisearth,
@whoisearth@lemmy.ca avatar

I honestly think the generalization of parents here are GenX where we grew up on Atari, colicovision and then the original NES.

otp,

There were still plenty of 16-bit and even some 32-bit era games that didn’t have saving…or used passwords to save.

Or if you could save, did you have space in your memory card?..

Lesrid,

My neighborhood was just poor enough that basically no kid had a PS memory card. They were all jealous of my n64’s ability to save on the cartridges. When the PS2 and GameCube rolled around we just left the machines on all day again

otp,

At some point, I’d have passed on a new game and chosen to get a memory card instead, haha

Though I did get bitten with the RPG bug back then, so that probably colours my opinion. Not that I didn’t play the first half of FF7’s Midgar (aka. first act) dozens of times because I kept getting stuck.

It’s great that level select cheats were so prevalent back then!

Etterra,

Could do without online play.

NielsBohron, (edited )
@NielsBohron@lemmy.world avatar

I do go without. The only time I ever play online is playing PvE games with my good IRL friends that live in different countries and states now, and that’s maybe twice a month.

No randoms, no tantrums when we make noob mistakes, no toxicity. When my friends aren’t around, I play single player games or play with bots instead of people. I highly recommend it.

mlg,
@mlg@lemmy.world avatar

I remember when volvo invented lootboxes to make tf2 free to play instead of selling a $60 “AAA” title with a battlepass and lootboxes included.

Droechai,

They should have made the patent free to use as long as the game was free to play, like they did with the seat belt patent

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

If memory serves, Valve got the idea for the loot boxes from Korean free to play games. As far as I know though, they did invent the battle pass with Dota 2.

Underwaterbob,

You don’t miss those games, you miss being a kid playing those games.

Soggy,

I still go back and play some old stuff from my childhood. Super Mario 3 is still a really good 2D platformer.

Underwaterbob,

Exactly. If people missed playing those games so much, they’d be playing those games. NES games are trivial to emulate.

And this is the ultimate in survivorship bias. Super Mario 3 is often touted as the best game of an entire generation. There are a lot of mediocre NES games.

caut_R,

The good thing was that games were complete and they didn‘t try to suck ever last penny out of you post-launch. Also, no updates meant they actually couldn‘t just ship them broken and fix later…

TrousersMcPants,

But it did mean they would ship them broken with no chance of fixing them, tbf.

melpomenesclevage,

Still happens, used to be rare

uienia,

That only happened extremely rarely. Nowadays it seems to be almost mandatory, precisely because the mindset is that they can just fix it later

Cocodapuf,

That happened like, 6 times.

I can literally only think of a handful of games that had serious bugs.

There was that ninja turtles game for nes with the impossible jump, there was enter the matrix for PS2/xbox that was completely not done. There were a few games that were poorly conceived in the first place like ET for Atari…

But yeah, what else had serious bugs?

ouRKaoS,

WrestleMania 2000 on N64 had a bug that would randomly delete all saved data.

Honytawk,

There isn’t a single game without bugs

TrousersMcPants,

There was plenty of terrible, buggy games you just didn’t see because stores would drop them. PC had it far worse than console did back in the day. I think it’s also that games are just way fucking cheaper now, adjusted for inflation a SNES game was around 120 bucks and a PS2 game was around 75 bucks.

Cocodapuf,

I just don’t see how games that don’t meet QA requirements and subsequently aren’t shelved are in any way comparable to every game on the market today…

I mean I never had to encounter those bugs, games that weren’t shelved didn’t exist in any meaningful way because nobody spent money on them. But nearly every probably half of the games I buy and play today have serious bugs on day 1 (and many still have them on day 300). That feels like a different paradigm to me.

Lautaro,
@Lautaro@lemmy.world avatar

Tekken used to have more than half of the characters HIDDEN. Now they just sell them one by one.

TrousersMcPants,

Well the new Tekken games launch with more and more characters, besides 7 which did launch with less than 6, and if you consider that the price of games has gotten cheaper due to inflation since the first Tekken it starts to make sense that they’re trying to make more money off them. Games have been costing more to make while costing less to buy for decades now and the industry is reaching a point where that’s become unsustainable but people just won’t accept a larger sticker price and longer development cycles so studios are finding new ways to make money. Personally I think selling characters as they come out for a few bucks is actually not a bad thing in fighting games, it keeps the games alive and interesting for much longer so long as it’s done well.

menemen,
@menemen@lemmy.world avatar

Maybe I am old, but having no micro-payment bullshit is what made gaming better.

smeg,

Never been to an arcade, eh?

menemen,
@menemen@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, but Arcades are Arcades. They were also not really a thing in Germany (because they are 18+ in Germany). I only ever used them on vacations.

smeg,

My point is that they are representative of how gaming used to be. Good on Germany for treating addiction-based money-extractors as what they are though!

uienia,

Not really a microtransaction as much as a leasing payment

smeg,

I’d say they’re both microtransactions, just one is full-on pay-to-play

Cocodapuf,

You could buy most of those games for console though…

smeg,

Not before consoles existed you couldn’t!

Honytawk,

The cheap downgraded version, yes

Swedneck,
@Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

there are plenty of modern games without micropayments, play smaller indie titles.

Blackmist,

Or indeed some bigger games not from shitty publishers.

God of War, for example. A lot of Sony’s exclusives (and many are now on PC) are completely MTX-free. Even EA’s It Takes Two was free of them.

The issue is that they don’t make the return on investment that an exploitative multiplayer game does. So the big publishers prefer to make those.

Pika, (edited )

It takes two is actually one step further, only one player had to own the game. It takes two had what was called a friend pass which as long as you weren’t the host of the game allowed you to play with any other player that had already purchased the game. So despite the fact that it was forced Co-op either split screen or online, only one player had to actually buy the game.

In this day and age it blew me away when I learned that because it’s just unheard of now.

solitaire,
@solitaire@infosec.pub avatar

The level of quality and number of bugs depends a lot on the era you’re talking about, as well as the platform. As a PC gamer from the 90s, much of my technical literacy came about from trying to coax games to work. My experience with console gaming was usually much more hassle free, though I have far less experience with it and don’t have a modern point of comparison (last console I even used, not even owned, was the PS3).

My real point of “it was better in the old days”, is the industry learning to exploit addiction. It’s everywhere, and it’s not just gambling. The longer you play the more likely you are to pay so even without loot boxes and the like, games are taking as much out of casino playbooks as possible. It’s fucking revolting and should be criminal.

As someone who has had problems with addiction of various kinds in the past, it’s so blatant to me. I can feel it playing into my vulnerabilities and it makes my blood boil. I avoid most gaming these days because I know if I let it become a habit, the next time life knocks me down I’ll fall victim to this.

Soggy,

As a PC gamer from the 90s, much of my technical literacy came about from trying to coax games to work.

Kids these days have no idea how easy they have it. Tracking down a driver update or patch (that you just moved to an unencrypted folder) on a dial-up connection? Re-installing your OS from a series of floppy disks because something broke, again? Limiting clock speed because so many things were tied to CPU cycles and wouldn’t function on new hardware?

PC gaming was a nightmare but you put up with it because StarCraft or Quake 3 online was dope as hell, we had Diablo and Myst and Half-Life and Doom and Putt-Putt Goes to the Goddamned Moon so it was all worth it.

dogslayeggs,

Limiting clock speed because so many things were tied to CPU cycles and wouldn’t function on new hardware?

I remember the day I learned this lesson.

solitaire,
@solitaire@infosec.pub avatar

Young gamers don’t know the pain of a BSOD and the interminable wait getting back into game on an IDE hard drive. Even a CTD was a nightmare.

ricdeh,
@ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

This is restricted to a small part of modern gaming, though. In indie games, for example, you find none of these exploitative practices (talking in general, of course) and get wonderful, masterfully crafted works of art by people who do game development out of passion (also speaking in general, of course).

solitaire,
@solitaire@infosec.pub avatar

This is restricted to a small part of modern gaming, though. In indie games-

Yeah, no, maybe the fact that you had to immediately jump to indie games should have been a hint that it’s not a small part.

Wes_Dev, (edited )

You didn’t have to deal with random re-balancing changing your gameplay, spying and tracking embedded in everything, hackers ruining the game or targeting you, invasive DRM (consoles), being forced to update your system for an hour before you can play, being forced to sign up for bullshit accounts in order to play the game you just bought, games that have required updates the day they come out, your games disappearing forever because the publisher changed their mind and removed it from the store, game content being removed to sell as DLC instead, being pressured to link social media accounts, bigger companies buying the game and forcing you to use their services to play it, companies monitoring and recording player interactions, companies going under making it impossible to play the game you already bought…

Holy shit. I never realized how bad modern gaming has gotten.

smeg,

Modern AAA gaming, this is like complaining that all movies are copy+paste superhero flicks because that’s all you see at the cinema!

Wes_Dev,

I think that’s a fair point.

A lot of my favorite games are indie titles or from small dev teams.

smeg,

I did a post a while back, it’s a great time to be playing games even if you have to ignore a lot of crap

melpomenesclevage,

Fucking capitalism. Ruins everything. Including, according to studies of divided Berlin; sex.

BaardFigur,

deleted_by_author

    •
    melpomenesclevage,

    The game was about the game. Get off my lawn.

    Carighan,
    @Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

    Yeah. I mean there was shitty stuff back then, of course.

    Arcade games, games designed to not be beatable without their guides (it’s why moon logic is a concept in the first place), that kind of stuff. But it’s a whole different level nowadays.

    cyd, 
    
<span style="color:#323232;">Into my heart an air that kills
</span><span style="color:#323232;">From yon far country blows;
</span><span style="color:#323232;">What are those blue remembered hills,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">What spires, what farms are those?
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">That is the land of lost content,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">I see it shining plain,
</span><span style="color:#323232;">The happy highways where I went
</span><span style="color:#323232;">And cannot come again.
</span>
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